Exaptation is just a ten-dollar word for unintended consequences.
The raison d’etre of the blog is, no surprise, sauropod vertebrae, but we also care very much about open access and are not above using the blog as our digital soapbox. Also, our paper-related blogging in the wake of Taylor et al. (2009) set off several rounds of discussion, both here and elsewhere online, about the role of blogs in science. Although the increasing overlap between blogs and journals is not precisely or only a matter of open-vs-closed access, neither is it unrelated. Both issues are part of the ongoing revolution in how science is communicated, both among researchers and with (with, not to) the general public.
The following SV-POW! articles deal with these subjects:
- Off-topic: non-open academic publishing is dead
- Choosing a journal for the neck-posture paper: why open access is important
- Blog posts, papers, and the brave new digital world: your thoughts are welcome
- Blogs, papers, and the brave new digital world: Matt’s thoughts
- Blogs, papers, etc.: some more random thoughts, from Mike this time
- Yet more uninformed noodling on the future of scientific publishing and that kind of thing
- Right, that’s it — time for the revolution
- Ornithischian Limb-Bone Project Of The Decade
- Electronic publishing is inevitable and even the ICZN is beginning to accept it
- Notes on Early Mesozoic Theropods and the future of zoological nomenclature
- University of California vs. Nature
- I only just realised … the draft Phylocode does not recognise electronic publication!
- Tutorial 9: how to get copies of academic papers
- An open letter to Palaeontologia Electronica
- An open letter to PLoS ONE — a pox on your numbered references!
- Please welcome the ICBN to the 21st Century
- Researchers! Stop doing free work for non-open journals!
- Authors versus publishers
- Nature and Elsevier on peer-reviewing
- Collateral damage of the non-open reviewing boycott
- Economics of open-access publishing
- “I do not see much changing.” Oh really?
- Now Elsevier starts a PLoS ONE clone
- **** this line flags the beginning of the Academic Spring ****
- Do your bit to oppose the evil Research Works Act
- The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers
- New in the Guardian: Academic publishers have become the enemies of science
- Nature and Science both oppose the RWA
- Publishers do not provide peer-review. We do.
- An astonishing new foolproof way to get funding for any science project
- It’s like rain on your wedding day
- Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers
- What is a “private-sector research work”?
- What actually is Elsevier’s open-access license?
- Want free-to-use silhouettes of organisms? PhyloPic is here!
- Blog citations are better than pers. comms.
- “But researchers have the access they need”
- Biology Open journal uses not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA license
- Who is publishing how many open-access papers?
- Academic Spring and a declaration of independence
- D-Day: going on the offensive over public access
- Why isn’t anyone publishing open-access articles in Elsevier journals?
- A window of opportunity for Elsevier
- A response to one Elsevier employee, and an open letter to the rest
- Infographic: contribution and revenue for a typical scholarly paper
- All right then, so what are the alternatives?
- What if we just post PDFs on the open web?
- A new site: Who needs access? You need access!
- My new article is up at Discover Magazine‘s guest blog, The Crux
- A single, simple, direct question to publishers about the RWA
- Scientific reputations and clashing worldviews
- What have we learned about Elsevier’s open-access licence?
- Today is Copyright Transfer Agreement Day!
- Holy poop! They did it! Elsevier withdraws support for the Research Works Act
- This just in: the Research Works Act is dead!
- Can Elsevier save itself?
- Sign the White House’s public access petition!
- Five people every second are denied access to JSTOR
- Winkling licence information out of Elsevier, bit by bit
- Building Insights. Breaking Links.
- New at Times Higher Education: “Open, moral and pragmatic”
- It’s not all doom and gloom in academia: at least Elsevier are increasing their profits!
- Understanding Elsevier’s open-access licence, part 4: who owns copyright?
- French fries and academic publishing
- Pay to download Elsevier’s “open access” articles
- Elsevier are not evil
- Following up on Biology Open journal’s not-quite-open CC-BY-NC-SA licence
- Changes through growth in sauropods and ornithopods [skip down to PLoS ONE vs. Journal of Morphology]
- P.S.I.O.N podcast on open access and metrics
- Call for comments on RCUK’s new Open Access policy
- My RCUK submission
- A farewell to Nature Precedings
- The call for comments on RCUK’s draft open-access policy is open till Tuesday 10th April
- The tide is turning on Open Access
- Open access in the public eye
- Two new dispatches from the Shiny Digital Future
- How Elsevier can save itself, part 0: Introduction
- How Elsevier can save itself, part 1: Easy
- Harvard’s library can’t afford journal subscriptions
- JVP’s new open access fee
- How Elsevier can save itself, part 2: Medium
- SV-POW! is now (finally!) open access
- How Elsevier can save itself, part 3: Hard
- UK Government on open access: better than I could have hoped
- They said it would never happen — but it just has
- Filter-then-publish vs. publish-then-filter
- See, this is why publishers irritate me so much
- Publishers versus everyone
- Help the USA into the 21st century (even if you’re not American)
- Open access gathers pace — and you can make a difference
- I would like an explanation for why it costs $585 to email an open-access article
- The Publishers Association is hallucinating
- Scopus is useless
- My submission for the SSP annual meeting’s panel discussion
- Freeing digitised journal archives
- Great news! 44% of libraries will save money from Green OA!
- Springer has work to do to keep its open-access leadership
- Springer are digging themselves deeper into a hole
- My comments to Times Higher Education about the White House petition
- A completely pointless mini-rant on journal guidelines
- “But researchers have the access they need”, redux
- Belated thoughts on the Finch Report on achieving Open Access
- Positive signs from Wiley on open access
- Dear Wiley: please use Creative Commons Attribution for your open-access activities
- What should society journals do about open access?
- What does it cost to publish a paper with Elsevier?
- Thoughts on the Finch Report, part 2
- Front page of today’s Guardian: Free access to British scientific research within two years
- How to start a new open-access journal: practicalities
- What does it cost to publish a paywalled paper with anyone?
- Where peer-review went wrong
- Some more of peer-review’s greatest mistakes
- What is this peer-review process anyway?
- PeerJ: sorted
- The ICZN now recognises electronic publication!
- On the problem of “predatory open-access publishers”
- Posting palaeo papers on arXiv
- Elsevier allows free access to all articles over four years old in “primary math journals”
- Counting beans
- What is the difference between a paper and a blog post?
- Publish means “make public”. Paywalls are the opposite of publishing
- Do not moderate comments on your blog [partial repost of Tutorial 18]]
- Wiley has switched to Creative Commons licensing for its open-access journals
- Four Short Pieces: forging onward into the Shiny Digital Future
- What we at SV-POW! are doing for Open Access Week
- Tutorial 19a: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?
- Tutorial 19b: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 2: Gold and Green
- Questions concerning Open Access research
- Tutorial 19c: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 3: a brief note on Platinum/Diamond
- Tutorial 19d: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 4: licences
- Tutorial 19e: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 5: copyright
- Well, that about wraps it up for peer-review
- Tutorial 19f: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 6: open access that comes and goes
- The single greatest thing that’s ever been said in author instructions
- Crowdsourcing a database of “predatory OA journals”
- What does it cost to publish a Gold Open Access article?
- Where do formatted references come from?
- What would happen if I placed my manuscripts in the Public Domain?
- My submission to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee
- Why did the UK government fund manure instead of apple trees?
- Giving it both barrels at the Guardian
- Is it immoral to hide your research behind a paywall?
- 3rd try: the choice of where to publish has a moral component
- What if an open-access publisher goes bankrupt?
- Open access books
- My submission to the House of Commons inquiry on Open Access
- What is a viral licence?
- PeerJ launches today! (and we’re in it!)
- Open peer-review at PeerJ
- Support this: the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR)
- Publishers versus libraries
- Quick hits: theses on arXiv, teaching with PeerJ, Wedel talks this week
- How disruptive is PeerJ?
- The House of Lords’ terribly disappointing report on Open Access
- The progressive erosion of the RCUK open access policy
- What an amazing day for open access
- Publishers do not manage peer-review, either. We do.
- Can repositories solve the access problem?
- All Green-OA embargoes are iniquitous
- The only winning move is not to play
- Nature on choosing to publish in open-access journals
- Banned from commenting at Nature
- “I don’t think it’s appropriate”
- A short thought on Edwin Mellen Press
- A pox on your numbered references, redux
- Banned from commenting at Nature AGAIN
- A few words on Elsevier’s acquisition of Mendeley
- Idiot things that we we do in our papers out of sheer habit
- My opening statement at the Evolution Or Revolution debate
- The evolution-or-revolution debate at the Oxford Union
- Seriously, Mendeley people, what did you expect?
- Check your calculations. Submit your data. Replicate.
- Predatory publishers: a real problem
- Peer review does not mean we can trust a published paper
- The opportunity cost of paywalled research
- Of divorce lawyers and scholarly publishers
- Of course the serials crisis is not over, what the heck are you talking about?
- Biology and palaeontology papers in arXiv
- The SV-POW! open-access decision tree
- Who owns a peer-reviewed, revised, accepted manuscript? YOU DO!
- Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks
Speaking of communicating science, here are the links to the Clash of the Dinosaurs saga:
- Lies, damned lies, and Clash of the Dinosaurs
- Clash of the Dinosaurs: Dangerous Ltd document their own dishonest editing
- Clash of the Dinosaurs: The Discovery Channel steps up
Comments are open; let us know what you think.
September 6, 2009 at 12:47 am
[...] Farke, the open-source paleontologist, on a new project where we plan to actually do some of this Shiny Digital Future that we keep on talking about. Andy will be announcing the details on Tuesday 8th September. [...]
October 1, 2009 at 7:27 pm
[...] message of the paper will be familiar to anyone who’s been following the Shiny Digital Future thread on this site; as indeed will parts of the text, as the paper is basically a more carefully [...]
April 21, 2010 at 9:10 pm
[...] slowly crumbling, and indeed we have a whole section of the site dedicated to that vcry thing: the Shiny Digital Future. The process is slow, which should surprise nobody given that large, powerful, profit-motivated [...]
April 21, 2010 at 9:14 pm
[...] slowly crumbling, and indeed we have a whole section of the site dedicated to that vcry thing: the Shiny Digital Future. The process is slow, which should surprise nobody given that large, powerful, profit-motivated [...]
June 11, 2010 at 11:54 pm
[...] have noted Keith Yamamoto’s SDFy comments at the end of the Chronicle article: “In many ways it doesn’t matter where the [...]
November 2, 2010 at 12:54 pm
[...] ma mike taylor zu zitieren. sitz grad mitm mike im lan-raum (= cip-insel; rechenzentrum), wir ham sogar [...]
November 12, 2010 at 10:38 pm
[...] you do. This is a solved problem. We’re living in the Shiny Digital Future [...]
March 17, 2011 at 12:02 am
[...] the main reason Ask A Biologist is exciting to me is because it’s a manifestation of the Shiny Digital Future. As recently as a decade ago, there was a clear separation between working scientists and the [...]
July 20, 2011 at 9:37 am
[...] Now is the time for the zoological code (ICZN) to follow suit! I’ve argued before — in the Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, no less — that electronic publication of nomenclatural acts is inevitable, and will be accepted by the taxonomic community with or without the endorsement of the Code: the botanical Code’s whole-hearted endorsement of this reality is further evidence that the ICZN’s current only-paper-counts stance is untenable now that we all live in the Shiny Digital Future. [...]
August 30, 2011 at 12:20 pm
[...] academic publications and what can be done about it (and many relevant articles are linked from the Shiny Digital Future page). What’s new is that this is being discussed in the pages of major mainstream [...]
October 8, 2011 at 9:41 pm
[...] want to leave you with this observation. Since we are now living in the Shiny Digital Future, this is much easier than it used to be. OK, it doesn’t help with becoming a rock star or [...]
March 19, 2012 at 3:33 pm
[...] don’t know” title (which, remember, has to reach people who don’t know about the OA wars); the article contains some new facts and analysis and, in my opinion, precisely nails the problem. [...]
April 28, 2012 at 12:23 am
[...] the huge amount we’ve written about open access on this blog, it may come as a surprise to realise that the blog itself has not been open access [...]
October 14, 2012 at 6:48 pm
[...] are part of an ongoing discussion whereas papers are [...]
December 31, 2012 at 4:42 pm
[...] gotten a few complaints this year about how much time we’ve spent talking about open access instead of dinosaurs. Brian Engh is in the more-dinosaurs faction, but he doesn’t just [...]